11 Funnest Board Games of

All Time

For who amongst us doesn’t enjoy some rousing

laughter?

It has been said that it’s all about neurotransmitters to the

brain and the powerful adrenaline and cortisol stimulants.
When those combine for super thrills on a board game,
the result is funnest, as in our 11 funnest board games of
all time. So here’s the thing: if you’re the reclusive type,
we beseech you to come out and carpe diem (smell the
roses).

Have a party –invite some friends- and indulge in a laugh

or two! Research has demonstrated that the only antidote
to stress that is more potent than socializing is laughter –
bellow-laughter!
Here are our 11 funnest board games of all time:

If your measure of fun is to let all your fight-or-flight

aggression pour all out on a game board, then Kemet is
just the game for you.

Played between 2 and 5 players, this ancient-Egypt war

game starts each player with a city, a few pyramids, a 6-
card deck, and the ability to buy from 48 power tiles that
empower you to develop armies that are incrementally
sturdier, tougher or more murderous.

From that point on, you can acquire a temporary or

permanent victory point each time you defeat an enemy,
mount a successful defense or accomplish other feats to
further boost your powers. The first player to possess 8
victory points wins it all!

Friends, this is a total war game –no holds barred- that

includes glorious attack strategies, conquering territory,
appeasing the gods, tactical bluffing to bait opposition
armies, riding giant creatures and teleporting your armies
from one territory to another. You’ll be alternating
between fun and much sweating!

You may want to watch the many available Kemet videos

online.

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No list of the 11 funnest board games is complete without

Rollick!, the hilarious game of clues and team
collaboration that can be taught in a jiffy and done with in
less than half an hour.

Do you reckon you know your team partners well enough

to illustrate something without uttering a word? Here’s
your opportunity to put your brain waves and dramatizing
–quasi theatrical- skills to the ultimate test at a game that
has an intriguing twist to the classic charades model.

Game buffs at a riotous gathering are grouped into two

teams, each accommodating up to 10 or more players,
and each pitching in to act out clues for one or more
persons to divine.

With some 750 clues, no game is ever the same, whether

brought out at parties, family gatherings, work events or
holiday celebrations.

And each game includes words for younger players and

various ideas for groups of different levels of
sophistication.

ROLLICK! is a fast and furious team-competition game

that’ll keep them arguing and laughing well after one team
crushes the other!

You can find many tips online that will help you sharpen
your Rollick! Strategies.

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This game won the prestigious Mensa Select award as
well as Games Magazine’s party game of the year for
2007, the year that the latest and more sophisticated
edition came out.

Wits & Wagers is a trivia game that is played over 7

rounds, with one card asking the question in each round.
It involves 4 to 18 team players, each one placing their
numerical answers simultaneously on the betting mat
(parts of the board that offer different odds).

For example: “how many touchdowns did Joe Montana

throw in the 1989 NFL season?” If your answer is closest
(but not over) the correct number, you get paid in chips by
the house, multiplied by the odds you bet it at. The player
with the most chips at the end of the seventh round wins
it all.

For the truth-obsessed fact-pragmatist, the trivia cards

are thankfully relayed with some context and background,
so that everyone gets to understand the question even if
unfamiliar with its subject-matter.

If your guest aficionados are well past Trivia Pursuit and

want something different, Wits & Wagers never ceases to
engage every participant.

Wits & Wagers has a way of making folks feel real dumb,
although in the end everyone is placed under the idiot
spotlight, with excitement and laughter overshadowing
everything else.

Acquaint yourself online with a few of the Wits & Wagers

strategies.

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We would have been deemed reckless had our list of 11
funnest board games been without the quick-draw,
classic family and party game of Pictionary.

Four people in teams of two is the ideal match, although

Pictionary can be played with fewer or more enthusiasts,
with preferably an even number of players on each team.

To set up, the Pictionary box provides the board, a one-

minute timer, up to 496 cards, up to 4 category cards and
two dice. You will also need some paper and writing
instruments. The goal is to guess what the “picturist” is
trying to say with the pictures that they draw, and the
guesses are frequently just as quirky as the sketches, so
roll the dice and get the party going.
Making good guesses entitles you to roll the dice and
move forward. You then draw a card, and the category you
must draw must match the color square you’re on. The
new picturist then gets one minute to sketch, and the first
to get to the finish square wins it all.

Watch out for cheaters! Your own house rules spell out the
penalties you set for those who try to circumvent what
you agree upon. And we all know how much more fun a
game is when the guidelines are eccentric!

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It is thought that backgammon, one of the oldest 2-

person strategy games, dates back some 5000 years.
Although a dice is involved, there are hundreds of tactical
ways that lead to victory.

Backgammon is played on a board that is divided into 4

quadrants and that has 24 narrow triangles or “points”, like
squares on other game boards. Each player has 15
checkers to start with, distributed on the board in a
specific starting position:

5 checkers on your home quadrant, 3 on your middle

quadrant, 5 on your opponent’s middle quadrant, and the
last 2 on your far quadrant (or your opponent’s home
quadrant).

You then move your checkers in accordance with the roll

of the dice so that they all end up in your home quadrant
where each further roll of the dice enables you to remove
checkers. The first person to thus remove all their
checkers wins it all!

In the interim, any checker that is not doubled up with

other checker(s) can be removed by the opponent. A
removed checker can come back into play on the
opponent’s home quadrant from which point it has to
make all the rounds to your home quadrant.

Although backgammon may sound complicated to the

uninitiated, once you learn it, you quickly find out how
addictive it gets.

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If you haven’t yet waged war on the classic game of
Taboo, consider yourself in a minority of board game
aficionados. Planning a party? The fun gets totally
uproarious when you set up the board and start playing
(the board in Taboo is merely for score keeping).

This is a guess-the-word game whereby there are

hundreds of cards to pick from, each card displaying the
key guess-word, plus a number of taboo words you
cannot use -usually a handful of synonyms or words with
a similar meaning.

In Taboo, 4 to 10 players, in even-numbered teams, sit

around in a circle. One of the players on your team
(dubbed the “giver”) picks up a word-card and then
attempts to prompt teammates to guess the word without
using any of the taboo words. As many word-cards as
possible can be used by a team within the allotted time.

The fun gets hysterical if and when the opposing team

buzz you out when you come anywhere close to using a
taboo word.

This is an ever-so-easy game to play that can be counted

on to create a frenzied-fun party atmosphere, and if you
consider yourself a board game buff, your collection is
flawed if it doesn’t include Taboo!

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As in all of our 11 funnest board games, and whether with
family members around a kitchen table or in party settings
with friends, Spontuneous is guaranteed to flush your
system with adrenaline and cortisol hormones. This time
though not so much with tension over armies and bloody
wars, but with a heavy dose of reminiscing that takes you
back to “oh, such happy times”!

The goal is to move your piece ahead of all others to the

end of the board, and if you’re familiar with Encore, this is
a relatively newer board game that has the same feel to it.

You start by falling back on songs you’re familiar with, and

you fill out a “hitlist” with a random word derived from
those songs. Players then take turns citing a trigger word
from their hitlist, and the first player to start singing at
least 5 words from a song that includes that word gets to
roll the dice and begin moving forward on the board.

Here’s what one player had to say about her experience:

“I can’t get over Spontuneous! I played it with some

friends yesterday and can’t wait to play it again with my
parents and 14 year-old sister who knows so many songs.
It was amazing hearing what songs we could remember
and what memories they evoked.”

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Concept has the distinction of having been a winner at the
French Jeu de L’année (best game of the year) for 2014. It
is a quiz board game in which players have to guess a
concept, whether a word, a name or a phrase.

The goal is to guess the “concept”, not by acting it out, as

with other games, but through word associations. The first
player to guess the concept receives 1 victory points, and
the team that chose it receives another point. The player
that then ends up with the most points wins it all.

Concept is played with teams of 2 players each (4 to 10

players in all), on a board that features different-colored
themes/icons such as “object”, “person” and the like. It is
claimed that the Concept board should contain enough
concepts necessary to describe anything on these cards.

Each team is given game pieces, for example a primary

one depicting a question mark, which can then be placed
on “object”, followed by a secondary one (e.g. a colored
cube) that may go on “food/drink”.

To start the game, the first team draws a card out of a

deck, each card giving three sets of concepts in an
ascending order of difficulty. “Milk” or “bicycle” might be
easy concepts, whereas the name “Butch Cassidy” or the
phrase “the high road” could well prove to be a game
buster.

Each game typically lasts about 40 minutes and, once

again, you could devise your own house rules to make it
easier or more difficult depending on who you are playing
against.

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There is a swashbuckling sense of honor, fighting to the
death, pillaging, burning, destroying and falling to the
sword –murderous clans on a horrific rampage.

Ragnarök is upon us, and it’s the end of the world, Viking-
style!

When played by 4, a Blood Rage game commonly takes a

little over an hour. Players draw cards for force-upgrades,
and the game is done with after serving three card
rounds. Victory points are awarded for winning, holding
territory and other feats.

You get served a quantity of rage that you swop for

resources, honor for successful conquests, and the
maximum number of clansmen that you can use on the
field. You thus take control of this scruffy unit and wage
war across a small, dense board.

And the most fun part is how you can transform your army
to meet the different exigencies of war. For example, using
gifts from the gods, acquiring giant creatures to throw at
the enemy and onboarding additional fighters.

Battles are made all the more spellbinding because of

“modifier” cards, for while victory is a factor of the
number of warriors on a given battleground, these
modifiers can essentially move the goalposts.

And a number of cards are associated with Norse gods,

depicting the best strategy to adopt. For example,
Heimdall endows you with foresight, Tyr bolsters your
forces in battle, and the unpredictable Loki actually
remunerates you for losing a battle by censuring the
winner.

Blood Rage offers a boatload of blood-spattered fun. Even

the meek get awash with pent-up exhilaration following
the bloodthirsty extravaganza that Blood Rage offers.

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After much deliberation in regard to precisely on which of
the top spots in our 11 funnest board games to place
Battleship, the number 2 spot was thus selected for this
all-time warfare strategy board favorite.

Inspired by the game, and bearing the name Battleship as

well, a military science fiction movie was released by
universal Pictures in 2012.

Battleship is essentially a 2-player naval warfare game,

and yet it is often played at parties or in family gatherings
by larger teams siding up behind the 2 contenders.

Each player/team gets a board with two grids consisting of

10 horizontal squares (marked 1 to 10), and 10 vertical
squares (marked A to J). The one grid is used to hide
one’s warring ships, while the other is to mark down one’s
“misses” and “hits” on the opponent’s hidden grid.

To do battle, each player gets 7 naval ships including one

aircraft carrier that is 5-squares long, two battleships that
are 4-squares long, a destroyer and a submarine that are
3-squares long and 2 patrol boats that are 2-squares
long.

The idea is to scatter/hide your fleet on your home grid

and start calling out missile shots -for example D5- to see
if your opponent has parts of a vessel on D5. If your
opponent says “miss”, it means there wasn’t any part of a
ship on their D5, and you lose your turn. If you made a
“hit”, you get to shoot another missile until you miss.

The first person to sink all of the opponent’s naval fleet

wins it all.

A “house” variation that strives for more excitement

stipulates that you can only have one shot per turn, even
when it’s a hit. This gives the other team a chance to do
some simultaneous sinking of their own, leading to an
endgame full of last-minute thrills.

To borrow a phrase from Churchill, “Never in the history of

mankind…” has one game been so popular for such a long
time –a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one!

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The indomitable global dominance game of Risk is our
selection for the number one spot on our 11 funnest board
games of all time list.

In Risk, you have to summon every ounce of skill you can

muster in the domains of war, probability assessments
and strategizing, with rewards that border on the
unthinkable –world hegemony!

Risk is played by 2 to 6 players on a board that displays

the map of the world’s six continents, broken down into
42 countries.

The goal is to attack and eliminate opponents and

ultimately occupy all 42 territories while defending your
own territories by keeping at least one army on each.

To start with, there are 56 Risk-cards, broken into 42

cards depicting the 42 territories as well as an infantry,
cavalry or artillery symbol, 12 “mission” cards that come
with the Secret Mission Risk variant, and 2 wild cards.

You also get a set of tokens designating army size,

including 1 infantry army, 5 cavalry armies and 10 artillery
armies. The number of armies varies with the number of
players: if there are only 2 players, they each get 40
armies, descending down to 20 armies each when there
are 6 players.

The first to play, as determined by the dice, gets to place 1

army on a vacant territory of their choice.

The players then move in turn until all 42 territories are

occupied by at least one army each. The rest of the
armies are then placed by each player on territories that
the player already occupies, with no limits on the number
of armies you may place on a single territory.

At the beginning of each turn, you get more armies. For

example, you get 3 armies for every 3 countries you
occupy, and more armies if you dominate a continent. You
can also turn in sets of 3 cards of the same type (e.g.
infantry) for additional armies.

That’s when you may start attacking, though only

territories adjacent to yours. The roll of the dice can then
enable you to remove one of your opponent’s armies and
ultimately colonize their countries. For each country you
thus colonize, you get a Risk card, and 3 Risk cards can
be exchanged for new armies.

To add spice to your strategies, you may form alliances

with another player. You may for example agree not to
invade a particular continent until a convened upon
outcome is reached, following which all bets are off.

By then you’re approaching final victory, for by removing

all of an opponent’s armies, you get all their Risk cards,
and thereby more armies with which to fortify your
positions and execute attacks on other opponents.

Cautionary word: wear your gym garbs when you embark

on a Risk match, for a good game is reliably akin to a
serious workout!

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